”Our scholarly conference focuses on the displacement and resettlements of actors from Central and Eastern Europe in the West (broadly defined)
after 1945, with the view of overcoming the post-war era and the Cold War. “Overcoming”, here, has a double significance.
First, the conference aims to unfold the complexities and paradoxes of plural experiences of displacement and resettlement.
It invites humanists and social scientists to shed light on the agency of actors capable of reacting to epochal and destabilizing changes.
By bringing forth individual and collective trajectories, we strive to highlight biological and existential needs, and flexible and
chameleon-like strategies to fulfill them, as well as colliding, diverging, conflicting agendas, local and transnational opportunities and
limitations, and taboos and expectations from Western actors and host contexts.
Second, the conference aims to provide a scholarly forum in which displacement and resettlement throughout the second half of the twentieth
century can be analyzed beyond normative paradigms. A view from below of both major trends and fringe cases will open up the possibility for
analytical insights into the plurality and ambiguities of the Western host contexts. By focusing on a limited set of Westward mobilities, we aspire
to shed light on unexplored aspects of the global post-war era and the global Cold War.”

 

Organizers
Department of History, Lund University and Institute of Contemporary History, Södertörn University
Financers
Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies
Convenors
Per Anders Rudling (Lund University) and Francesco Zavatti (Södertörn University)
Coordinators
Odeta Rudling (Lund University) and Francesco Zavatti (Södertörn University)